Forum Discussion
Comment balloon opening on top of text on right side hover
I'm wondering if this is a precursor to the dreaded "Modern Comments" feature, which I do not have. I have Office 365, and last week comment balloons started opening up on top of the text if my cursor/pointer has been hovering in the comments pane. There is about a 5-10 delay before the pop-up occurs.
I need to be able to view the text and the comments at the same time. I work on both the text and the comments at the same time. It is very disruptive to have a comment balloon pop up when I'm trying to read the text, especially since the balloon duplicates the comment text I can already read in the right-side comments area.
I checked my options, and I do not see the option to turn off this annoyance.
Does anyone know how to stop Word from automatically opening comment balloons over the text?
8 Replies
Here, I am running a perpetual license (Office 2021) and there are pop-ups for comments when I choose the "Simple Markup" view. Are you seeing something like the screen shot below?
Note that if you are running a subscription version, modern comments may already be implemented, depending on the version you are running.
Note that if you see an option called "Enable modern comments" at File > Options > General, you can clear it and temporarily revert to the classic comment interface. (There is a corresponding option in Word for Mac Preferences.)
Yes, that is exactly what it looks like, although I am seeing it in All Markup view.
It looks like this:
I am using a subscription version of Office through my company, but none of my coworkers have noticed this yet, and we all use Word the same way. We are editors and our Word docs have lots of tracked changes and lots of comments, and we need to see it all.
My options don't have the line for Modern Comments:
The constant pop-ups of comments is very distracting when I'm working on a document.
The pop-up is useless because it blocks the text and it only shows part of the comment. I have to scroll down or expand the box and move the comment box to see the full comment and the text at the same time. I keep clicking the box closed, but it pops up again after another 10 seconds or so.
Thanks for the screen shot which helped clarify the situation. I now see that this isn't about modern comments at all. 🙂
In fact, a "stand-alone" comment window like the one in your screen shot indicates that Word can't fit all the comments in the Markup area, because there are too many comments on that particular page. To fix this, increasing the "Preferred width" for the balloons usually helps. You will find that option in the Advanced Track Changes Options dialog box. I tend to specify 15 centimeters for the balloons.
